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PODCAST

Tech Talks

Welcome to Tech Talks (A Podcast about Technology Leaders and Leadership). We explore the stories behind the most recognisable names in industry and the startups you’re yet to hear from. The innovation, cultural transformation and investment stories driving technology with host David Savage. If you’re interested in the latest ideas on AI, data, cyber-security this is the show for you. Follow and join the conversation. Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology

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All Episodes

00:39:39

Meet the Company on a Mission to Inspire a Million...

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/02

Every time the writer pitched one more personalised detail, the CTO's workload grew exponentially: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artwork permutations for one children's book. Now AI has made that product easier to build and the job harder. Mark Daniell (writer and education lead) and Alex Pond (CTO), co-founders of You Are The Star, turn children into the heroes of personalised sports stories, in print and in a digital library. Alex argues that AI hasn't removed work; it has

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00:26:38

AI Won't Fix the Hole in Your Roof

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/01

A customer told Taksina Eammano something that morning that should worry anyone running a physical workforce: 17% of their people will retire in the next few years, and decades of know-how will walk out with them. Her bet runs against the doom narrative. While AI disrupts desk jobs, she expects a surge back into the trades, because no model is fixing a roof or rewiring a building, and the global data-centre boom needs people on site. Recorded at Dreamforce, David Savage and Salesforce's EVP

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00:42:42

Why I Spent $30k on a GPU and Lost Four Kilos Testing AI

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/30

Three months after ChatGPT launched, Navan co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig bought a $30,000 GPU, spent months testing uncensored models and lost four kilos in the process. His question: if a model gives five different answers to the same prompt, how do you trust it in production? One finding stuck. It knows what a lie is, and will use one to avoid losing. That discovery shaped an AI agent that now resolves more than 62% of customer chats with zero critical hallucinations. We unpack why he's moving

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00:35:21

What Will You Do With the Hours AI Hands Back?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/29

When Tom White joined Salesforce, his pre-sales engineers (the people meant to be ahead of every tech shift) told him they were totally overwhelmed. His response was to clear their diaries every other Friday for learning, because you can't master agentic AI from the sidelines.As VP Solution Engineering, he argues that software is becoming infrastructure you never log into, and that the shift will trigger a decade of process redesign. We unpack whether AI is genuinely handing hours back or quietly

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00:33:43

Would You Let a Teacher Work Two Days a Week in Your...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/28

What if your next hire spent three days a week in a classroom and two in your team? It's the idea Beverly Clarke MBE admits she's putting out "in a really wild way". She means it as a fix for the widening gap between what schools teach and what industry says it needs.She and Rebecca Franks, co-hosts of Tech Journey Insights and both former teachers, argue the stakes are rising. AI is thinning out the junior roles that used to absorb new talent, and many teachers still can't see

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00:15:05

The Truth About AI Launches: "Is This Real?"

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/25

The question Salesforce hears most on the conference floor isn't about features. It's three words from the technical crowd: "Is this real?"Vendors announce strategic direction; the product sometimes lands weeks later. Meanwhile, buyers have budgets to set and a six-month roadmap to defend. Go all in on an autonomous sales agent today, or spend that time fixing the data it will depend on?Recorded at Dreamforce in San Francisco, away from the polished keynote messaging, David Savage

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00:27:59

Is Your AI Strategy Just a Science Project With a...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/24

Most AI programmes begin with the exciting part. Prashant Hinge, Chief Information and Transformation Officer at MSIG USA, argues that is exactly why so many aren't delivering value. He describes how the specialty insurer took a different route, the first transformation of his career to start with data: consolidating 15 insurance systems into a single data model in 12 months before building on top of it. We hear why he warned leadership the work could slow the business for the first 18 months,

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00:29:01

From Trafficking Survivor to AI Engineer: Rethinking...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/23

Too often, the story of human trafficking ends at the rescue. The survivor leaders Laura Hackney worked with wanted something different: a job, stability, a career. So who gets to build the technology the rest of us use?Laura is co-founder and CEO of AnnieCannons, a US nonprofit that trains survivors of human trafficking to become software and AI engineers. Students join a 12-month paid programme with health benefits and work on production code while they learn. Many don't arrive wanting to be

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00:33:43

Can You Afford Two Transformations at Once?...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/22

If AI promises 20x gains, then why are most enterprises seeing only 20%? In this episode of Tech Talks, David Savage sits down with Andrew Daniels, Group CIO of Betfred. Together, they unpack the reality of managing AI alongside ongoing digital transformations, tackling "productivity leakage", navigating player safety regulations, and confronting the hidden tokenomics of enterprise AI.David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click here.WhatsApp us

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00:28:30

What Elastic’s CISO Wants You to Fix Before Deploying...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/21

How do you secure autonomous AI agents when zero-trust fundamentals are still lacking? Mandy Andress, CISO at Elastic, joins David Savage to break down the reality of securing AI-driven enterprise data. From Elastic’s "Customer Zero" framework to grounding AI in context to prevent hallucinations, Mandy shares why tightly scoping permissions and deploying deception strategies are essential for modern resilience.As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete( our Digital

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00:26:24

Language Still a Barrier? Not for Much Longer.

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/18

DeepL's Gonçalo Gaiolas is building the Babel Fish for real: voice translation that captures tone, emotion, even your own vocal fingerprint, live and at near-zero latency. He explains why DeepL isn't racing the frontier labs, shares a story about a silent colleague who finally spoke up once a language barrier disappeared, and makes an unusually candid case for talking more openly about what constant technological change is doing to our heads. As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete(

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00:27:16

What Do You Need to Sacrifice to Succeed?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/17

Stuart Fenton, CEO of Ingentive, joins David to discuss why the AI cost conversation is broken. Everyone asks "how much will the tokens cost, Stuart says that's the wrong question; the right one is how much you'll save. He unpacks the real economics of AI transformation, the relentless discipline it takes to stay current, and the personal sacrifice behind every entrepreneurial bet. A blunt reframe of cost, risk, and what building something real actually demands.As we mention in

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00:29:46

Can Governance Actually Keep AI's Toddler Phase in...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/16

General Mills' Sanchit Srivastava (Senior Manager Data Analytics) joins the podcast to talk about why unstructured data isn't the hard part of implementation, governance is. He compares AI to a toddler ("it'll get there, but a lot happens on the way"), unpacks why token costs are about to explode, and makes the case that AI should be sold as an amplifier, not a replacer. Today's episode is a sharp, practical look at where enterprise AI actually breaks-down.As we mention in today's show, we'd love

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00:23:18

The Borehole That Built a Rocket

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/15

Moletsane Mophethe grew up walking to boreholes for drinking water in Lesotho. Now he's founded Metal Morph, recovering critical minerals like aluminium and iron straight from wastewater instead of landfill, cutting reliance on a global supply chain split between mines in Africa, Australia and Russia, and manufacturing concentrated in China. From childhood scarcity to a £700k pre-seed raise and deals covering 56% of UK water, this is what happens when you've lived the problem you're solving.WhatsApp

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00:41:05

AI Broke the Career Ladder. Did It Build a Replacement?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/14

AI is thinning out the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. There are fewer entry-level roles, fewer easy starts inside big organizations. OpenAI's Global Head of Founder Experience, Laura Modiano, doesn't dispute that. But she thinks the conversation stops one step too early...On this episode, David pushes her on the trade-off directly: if AI is closing doors inside large companies, is "just start your own business" a genuine answer, or a convenient one? Laura argues young, digitally fluent

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00:25:27

Is the UK Crippling Talent with a Funding Crisis?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/11

Patrick Smith, the founder and CEO of Zally, returns to Tech Talks with an update on building the world's first foundational model for human behaviour.Zally is a business that's grown from a Manchester ambition into a San Francisco-headquartered company with a research lab still rooted in the North of England. David and Patrick talk continuous authentication, the ethics of training AI on consented human behaviour, why the UK keeps losing founders to the US ecosystem (and what it could do

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00:34:50

Forget the Regulation: Why the EU AI Act is an...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/10

Is the EU AI Act keeping you up at night? Box's Global Head of Public Policy, Leah Perry, argues that organizations are looking at AI governance all wrong. It’s not a legal hurdle; it’s an operational maturity test. In this episode, we unpack why regulated industries are ahead, the real threat of ignoring employee upskilling, and how to build a cross-functional framework that keeps your business agile.We are also discussing a press release sent to us on the 9th of September, it's a statement

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00:29:13

Managing the Hyper-Confident Machine: The Reality of...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/09

AI agents write code faster than we can review it, shifting software developers from builders to managers of virtual colleagues. Chris Plowman, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Data and AI at Slalom, joins David to unpack this existential shift. Why are we returning to the age of the generalist? And why are CIOs discarding business fundamentals in a rush to implement AI?As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. Just click here.WhatsApp us

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00:36:24

Is Your Period Data Already Being Sold?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/08

Amber Vodegel built Pregnancy+ to 150 million users before selling to Philips. Now, she's back with 28x, a women’s health tracker tackling a massive risk: the monetization and exploitation of intimate health data. In this episode, Amber shares why she's ditching cloud servers and central databases entirely for an on-device architecture, the reality of 'return on mission' funding, and why AI-driven hiring platforms make data privacy a matter of survival.WhatsApp us your comments and questions on

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00:25:30

The "Silent Sabotage" of AI Adoption (And the...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/07

AI adoption isn't a tech problem; it's a profound organisational shift. Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of Monks, joins David Savage to expose the uncomfortable realities of AI: the "silent sabotage" from teams on the fence, the paternalistic industry lies about job losses, and why most enterprises are set to fail the transition. It’s a raw, honest look at what it actually takes to rebuild an organization at the speed of Silicon Valley.WhatsApp us your comments and questions on

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224 results

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